Posted on 09/23/2006 6:19:50 PM PDT by KevinDavis
The future will take to the skies over New Mexico next month as teams compete in the Lunar Lander Challenge sponsored by NASA under their Centennial Challenges program.
This effort uses prize contests to stimulate creativity and competition in solar system exploration, tapping the talents of non-traditional sources of innovation in academia, industry and the public.
Teams of rocketeers are readying their vehicles for the Lunar Lander Challenge to be held live October 20-21 at the Las Cruces International Airport in southern New Mexico.
The Vertical Lander Challenge (VLC) and Lunar Lander Challenge (LLC) presented by NASA are designed to speed up the commercial development of a vehicle capable of ferrying cargo or humans back and forth between the surface of the Moon and low lunar orbit.
The complete Lunar Lander Challenge purse of $2,500,000 -- NASA’s contribution is $2 million -- is divided into two levels. Level One is worth a total of $500,000. The more difficult Level Two is valued at a sum of $2,000,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I agree.. I think we are at the begining stages of a real space race....
Can you believe what the pork-barrelers are doing to the NASA-funded
competitive prizes program?
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp109&sid=cp109s0tv8&refer=&r_n=sr280.109&item=&sel=TOC_385521&
"The Committee does not provide any funding in fiscal year 2007 for the
Centennial Challenges program. Funding provided in previous fiscal years for
this program is sufficient for NASA to run a prize based competition, as
well as to verify that NASA will see tangential benefits from running such a
program. Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only
creates a pot of unused funds while other aspects of NASA's mission are
being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds."
Discussed here:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/001028.html
and indirectly here: http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes
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